tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37474993.post116999612893116266..comments2024-01-13T11:31:45.396+01:00Comments on The bLOGOS: MM Hawthorne: doubts, doubts, doubts...Dan López de Sahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16716694655307652854noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37474993.post-1170618025053948632007-02-04T20:40:00.000+01:002007-02-04T20:40:00.000+01:00Yeah, I agree with you if by 'standard' you mean a...Yeah, I agree with you if by 'standard' you mean a more or less "sociological" notion. But I am not aware of any argument for discriminating the "analytic" mereological principles from the one on (say) sums, do you?Dan López de Sahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16716694655307652854noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37474993.post-1170603388618997822007-02-04T16:36:00.000+01:002007-02-04T16:36:00.000+01:00Hello Marta and Dan, A couple of further comments,...Hello Marta and Dan, <BR/>A couple of further comments,<BR/>About your doubt 2. It seems to me that the alternative diagnostic you offer to the Convention Lover is not be acceptable for him, because it just seems to be against his view. His view is not that Gabriel’s language is “a sublanguage” of Michael’s. On the understanding of “sublanguage” you seem to be assuming, that might be the Plenitude Lover’s view: Gabriel quantifies over a subset of the domain over which Michael quantifies. But the Convention Lover’s view is different. It is the view that the two angels use different quantifiers that are completely alien to one another. That the angels are mutually unable to express the other’s thoughts seems to be a central part of the view rather than a consequence that could be avoided.<BR/><BR/>About your last point. I think that the standard view is that only some of the principles of mereology are analytic. I have been recently reviewing some philosophical presentations of mereology (Simons’ and Casatti&Varzi) and they share the idea that only some “core principles” can be deemed as analytic –basically the principles expressing the idea that parthood is transitive, symmetric and reflexive and maybe some supplementation principle (about this last point I think the authors mentioned disagree). On this standard view, the various fusion-principles are not analytic. Presumably, the justification for this standard view is something along the lines suggested by Ross Cameron in discussion with Dan at BLEB –which sounds sensible to me. I guess these reasons apply in general, and for the Plenitude Lover in particular. But the Plenitude Lover can happily adopt the standard view, whereas the Convention Lover has to deny it.Pablohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04444088251026690574noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37474993.post-1170378607130104302007-02-02T02:10:00.000+01:002007-02-02T02:10:00.000+01:00Hi Marta! Just some quick feedback about your worr...Hi Marta! Just some quick feedback about your worries 1 and 4. <BR/><BR/>Re 1, I take it that if Gabriel's quantifiers are unrestricted—as those of bold Gabriel are assumed to be—, then (by Gabriel's own lights) whatever is refered to by “something-on-Michael’s-domain-of-objects” <I>is</I> indeed something. (There might be the materials here for a (conditional) argument against the “Convention Lover,” see the discussion <A HREF="http://blogblogos.blogspot.com/2006/12/mm-sider-and-bennett-whether-exist.html" REL="nofollow">here</A> and references there.) Hence, it seems, endorsement of your Ref* would suffice (for him) for endorsing Ref.<BR/><BR/>Re 4, I also think (see <A HREF="http://blebblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/necessity-of-composition-i.html" REL="nofollow">here</A> and <A HREF="http://blogblogos.blogspot.com/2006/11/mm-bennett-existential-but-analytic.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>) that the Plenitude Lover might well hold that (plenitudinous) mereological principles are indeed “analytical.” Hawthorne seems to think that there are general reasons against this, which are different from the “existence-involving” ones I discussed, see his 5.2.. I am not yet sure about which exactly his worry is, I hope to post on that eventually.Dan López de Sahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16716694655307652854noreply@blogger.com